Wanted: a tighter story with more selective detail and, hence, greater effect.
A ponderous, tortuous debut novel relates a family’s sad breakup after a young psychiatrist is imprisoned for stealing the medications he’s become addicted to.
Saul Dubinsky, a doctor deeply shaken by a patient’s attempted suicide, is abruptly arrested in the middle of the night from his and his wife Rena’s Manhattan apartment. Stunned and unprepared, Rena and Saul’s father, Leonard, scramble to find a lawyer and to make sense of Saul’s attempt to steal from his hospital’s pharmacy, even though they’d seen clues of Saul’s increasingly desperate addiction before his arrest. Leonard, who was also a psychiatrist but left his practice to become a writer after the troubling suicide of a patient two decades before, proves the most loyal family member, though he is unable to persuade Saul’s mother, a 30-year bedridden hypochondriac, to allow them to put their New Jersey house up for collateral to meet Saul’s bail. Rena, on the other hand, who works for various political campaigns, can’t transcend the breach of trust involved, and by adulterous degrees breaks from the marriage. In alternating voices, the stories of these two main characters unfold: Rena’s unstable family past and shaky future; and Leonard’s devotion not only to Saul (whom he addresses in the second person) but to the wife he has grown emotionally estranged from. Added to fairly monotonous prose is the sin of many a first-novelist, leaving nothing out, with the result that the tale meanders aimlessly as Rena takes off to Guatemala to retrieve the body of a disappeared son of a dear friend of Saul’s. Storywriter and psychologist Gornick seems unsure how to tie up her convoluted saga, and Rena’s ultimate decision to have a baby with Saul, despite his languishing for four years in prison and their purported breakup, underscores still unresolved dramatic and narrative tensions.
Wanted: a tighter story with more selective detail and, hence, greater effect.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2002
ISBN: 1-56512-341-7
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2002
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.
The time is the not-so-distant future, when the US's spiraling social freedoms have finally called down a reaction, an Iranian-style repressive "monotheocracy" calling itself the Republic of Gilead—a Bible-thumping, racist, capital-punishing, and misogynistic rule that would do away with pleasure altogether were it not for one thing: that the Gileadan women, pure and true (as opposed to all the nonbelieving women, those who've ever been adulterous or married more than once), are found rarely fertile.
Thus are drafted a whole class of "handmaids," whose function is to bear the children of the elite, to be fecund or else (else being certain death, sent out to be toxic-waste removers on outlying islands). The narrative frame for Atwood's dystopian vision is the hopeless private testimony of one of these surrogate mothers, Offred ("of" plus the name of her male protector). Lying cradled by the body of the barren wife, being meanwhile serviced by the husband, Offred's "ceremony" must be successful—if she does not want to join the ranks of the other disappeared (which include her mother, her husband—dead—and small daughter, all taken away during the years of revolt). One Of her only human conduits is a gradually developing affair with her master's chauffeur—something that's balanced more than offset, though, by the master's hypocritically un-Puritan use of her as a kind of B-girl at private parties held by the ruling men in a spirit of nostalgia and lust. This latter relationship, edging into real need (the master's), is very effectively done; it highlights the handmaid's (read Everywoman's) eternal exploitation, profane or sacred ("We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices"). Atwood, to her credit, creates a chillingly specific, imaginable night-mare. The book is short on characterization—this is Atwood, never a warm writer, at her steeliest—and long on cynicism—it's got none of the human credibility of a work such as Walker Percy's Love In The Ruins. But the scariness is visceral, a world that's like a dangerous and even fatal grid, an electrified fence.
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1985
ISBN: 038549081X
Page Count: -
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1985
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
